101 Diversions

Normality

noreply@blogger.com (Xan) — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 04:39:00 +0000

Internally, I feel normal. I feel very, very normal. If my memories of everyone else were sucked out of my head, so that I had no frame of reference other than myself, I think on some fundamental level I would pretty much feel the same way about myself.

Perhaps we're all more or less predisposed to think of ourselves as normal, to condition on our own minds and bodies first and foremost. The differences between how we think of ourselves, I imagine, pale in comparison to how we think of each other. As one bit of supporting evidence, I think that my current self feels pretty much the same way about himself as Xan-2005 felt about himself, yet there is a large difference in how they think of each other.

On the one hand, I feel deeply normal. On the other hand, people would look at me strangely if I ever said that aloud. They would, I suspect, assume a certain degree of disingenuousness. But we are programmed, I think, to take ourselves for granted before we take the rest of the world for granted. By the time you arrive on the scene, you're too late to have anything to do with the way I already am. I am already normal, and external voices, even thousands of them, just don't have that much say in how I feel on a fundamental level.

Said another way, I think it's tempting to imagine that people in the tails of any distribution will have an innate sense that they are in the tails of a distribution, that they will feel abnormal. But my deepest point of reference is myself, not the whole distribution. I am the way I am, before any other data points enter the picture, before there is any distribution to speak of.

None of this means that I don't enjoy and suffer the consequences of my relative ability (or lack of it) in any given area. And I don't really know how alone (abnormal?) I am in my thinking above. But I want to get across my deep sense of arbitrarity in how things turned out: On the one hand people tend to feel that their abilities belong to them, as do I. If I also felt that the distribution of everyone else was fixed from the get-go, on some level I think I would feel entitled to my position in that distribution. But instead I feel like that distribution is totally arbitrary, and so my position in it feels arbitrary, even though I don't feel separable from my abilities.

I hope that makes sense. Maybe you're going, "Hey, me too!" Or for all I know, maybe lots of people feel weird inside...

Love and Hate

noreply@blogger.com (Xan) — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 06:01:00 +0000

Hindsight may be 20-20 in matters of fact, but artistic judgment is another matter altogether. I never quite know whether I'll come to love or hate something I once created, but either way, I am pretty much guaranteed either to love it or hate it. On this matter there doesn't seem to be much middle ground...am I the only one here?

For instance, today I listened to every song I ever wrote and recorded (or at least, part of every song. I didn't last 10 seconds on the stuff from high school). In chronological order: hate, HATE, love, hate, hate, love, LOVE, love. Okay so apparently there is some wiggle room at the extremes, but the point is, there doesn't seem to be anything that I merely like (or dislike).

On the other hand, during the process of creation, I almost always seem to love what I'm making. I almost always think it is my new best work. But the moment it's finished, I invariably begin to have doubts. Then typically follows a period of indecision, when I'm not really sure how much I like it. After a while, though, this process apparently limits to either love or hate.

Sometimes I like things at the time but come to hate them in the long run. On the flip side, for a while I disliked that last "love," and only recently have I come to really appreciate it. But now I really do love it. I was reluctant to share it with people at the time, but now you can have it for the low, low price of asking for it! That is what's known as an asking price, my friends.

What? You don't feel like asking? Well in that case, I guess you can still have some different love for the even lower price of clicking on a link.

However, let me be clear that I don't consider any of this stuff a "pinnacle" achievement. Writing and recording music is possibly the most complex thing I've ever tried to do! I used to put hobbies down when my improvements started to level off and I didn't get so much satisfaction per hour out of them anymore. But even though I haven't recorded anything in while, I think I was still learning and improving a lot with every new attempt. It was still really fun and exciting, and I always felt like I still had a long way to go, but that I would eventually make it. I stopped not because I got tired of the journey, but rather because my life started to get full of important school/work things, which makes me more than a little sad. I used to give things up because I got tired of them, but now I give things up because other important things have fought hard for the time, and won. The end of college was an incredibly fulfilling time, academically, but the opportunity cost was -- and continues to be -- dear. I suppose I have a love-hate relationship with school, too.

Magic!

noreply@blogger.com (Xan) — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 17:26:00 +0000

Check out this magic trick I just learned!

As you can probably tell, I am immensely pleased. I know how many magic tricks are done, but this is one of the few I can actually do myself. It's not particularly complicated or difficult, but I really like the effect. Where does the card go? Poof!

Announcing...

noreply@blogger.com (Xan) — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 07:02:00 +0000

I am now running an economics blog, if you're into that sort of thing:
ECONOMONOMICS

Limited time offer!

noreply@blogger.com (Xan) — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 17:25:00 +0000

Hey, anyone want a word featured prominently in a New York Times crossword puzzle?

I'm filling a puzzle right now and I seem to have some wiggle room for a word of either 5 or 7 letters in the very center of the puzzle. Hey, that's prime real estate! So, loyal readers, let me know if you have any requests, and I will consider them. It could be your name, or something random. I should also point out that knowing the future is great way to blow people's minds, especially in the context of a magic trick or a bet with large sums of money at stake...

Of course, I can't make any promises. Not every word is crossword-worthy (names especially), nor will every word accomodate good surrounding words...so the more you propose, the better your chances. And even if I go forward with it, the puzzle could easily be rejected. But if I do use your suggestion, and it does go through, I will certainly let you know.

If you want to be really bold, you can also propose a pair of words, 5 and 7 letters long, with the property that they cross in the middle (e.g. SHARK ATTACKS). Especially no promises for these though.

Email and comments are fine. The deadline is a few days.

Happy Holidays!

noreply@blogger.com (Xan) — Sun, 26 Dec 2010 05:28:00 +0000

If you still need a gift for someone, I highly recommend my new favorite book:

The New York Times Little Black and White Book of Holiday Crosswords

which, incidentally, I myself received as a gift today. Be sure to check out puzzle #123...

...where you will find my very first published puzzle, now in book form! Of course, the NYT publishes many collections of reprinted crosswords, so in some sense this is not unexpected. But I sure wasn't expecting it when I tore open the wrapping paper.

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Actually, to be perfectly honest, my real favorite crossword book continues to be:
Will Shortz' Favorite Crossword Puzzles

If you are the kind of solver who gets excited when Thursday rolls around, you should probably own this book first. But for everyone else, you should definitely buy the other book. I mean, they're holiday crosswords, and it's the holidays, so...perfect timing, right? I'm quite certain that everyone you know will want at least 5 copies. Trust me, I know about these things.

nyt crossword heads-up

noreply@blogger.com (Xan) — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 03:03:00 +0000

fyi, I had a puzzle in the new york times today (saturday).

By the way, I have mixed feelings about these last 2 themeless puzzles. They went into the pipeline a while ago, and at the time I was still pretty much trying whatever I could to get some puzzles published. When I started, I was creating whatever I thought of, and submitting whatever I created; in other words, I was letting the editors do most of the filtering. But as time has passed, I've grown a lot more selective about what I consider a good puzzle, and what I'm okay with in my own puzzles. I don't have time to make a lot of puzzles, so I want my few creations to be really solid. That, at least, is the goal.

In particular, I don't think themeless puzzles are really my strength, so don't expect to see too many of them in the future. I don't especially love making them, nor am I especially skilled at it. If the goal is to get published, and you are decent enough at filling puzzles, then they are a pretty dependable way of accomplishing that goal. But that's not the goal anymore.

Cooking it up

noreply@blogger.com (Xan) — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 01:52:00 +0000

Announcing a newly-launched blog where my family and I will be sharing our recent food efforts:
Vongsafood

I would not claim to be a good cook. But I do like to eat, and gone are the days of the college dining hall, or for that matter being fed by my parents (bless them). In the real world, it turns out that you can eat whatever you want, however much you want, and whenever you want it, if only you are willing to cook it. This darn hummingbird metabolism doesn't feed itself, so I have been cooking a lot in the last year.

PCM heads up

noreply@blogger.com (Xan) — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 02:34:00 +0000

The recent Pomona College Magazine had an article on the future of crossword puzzles! Catch it here:
http://www.pomona.edu/news/2010/10/20-crosswords-magazine.aspx

At the link you will also find a crossword puzzle they commissioned for the occasion. Feel free to give it a try, though you may not enjoy it as much if you aren't a Pomona person.

My favorite thing is how, in the print version, my name is extremely...what, capitalized? The initial X, a sad victim of perpetual oral butchering, has no parallel in print. Seriously, this is a sight to behold...

Well I suppose that's it then. Unbeatable. Things really can't get any more epic than this, can they? You should probably stop reading this blog right now, and never come back. Or at the very least I should stop writing it.

But of course I am still here, for better or for worse. And just like I should condition my bid on the event that I win the auction (lest I suffer the winner's curse), I will condition my writing on the event that you are still reading. So, here we are!

Some PCM comments...

On the puzzle:
I had a lot of fun with this puzzle. Making puzzles for a limited audience with something in common is always fun, and quite different from a puzzle geared towards mainstream publication. If you are solving it at home, please do me a favor and pretend that the title is "Start Your Search Engines!" This was edited, presumably to make it easier, but...well, now that the easiness boost has been irrevocably delivered, there's no harm in reverting to a title that is loaded with approximately 100 times more awesomeness. Truth be told, I really am sorry the puzzle turned out to be so thorny...but it was the first time I'd ever done such a theme and it turned out to be pretty darn constraining. Life.

On the interview...
Wow do I sound optimistic about the future of crosswords in this article! First of all, it's definitely true that "there's never been a better time to get interested." We are in something of a golden age right now. In the last few years, awareness has spiked on both sides of the table: The pool of constructors competing for publication has rapidly expanded (driving quality up), and I believe more solvers are finding crosswords as well (especially young ones). But newspapers are also crashing, and that's going to seriously change things.

What will happen? It's a fascinating question, and I think I have a pretty good answer in my thought queue, but this is not an economics blog.

Year in Review

noreply@blogger.com (Xan) — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 07:15:00 +0000

Loyal Reader emails:

"The people demand the year in review post."

Technically I only heard this from one people...but on the other hand, that's at least a third of my loyal reader base, so the people's wish is my command...

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Dear readers (yes, all <= 3 of you),
I learned not long ago that I passed my qualifying exams! As you can tell by the fact that it's bolded, this is very exciting news. Most importantly, and also bolded, this means that I am officially done with macroeconomics for the rest of my life. Let us all take a moment to celebrate this long-awaited occasion. Indeed I have literally been waiting since 11th grade of high school, when I slept through the macro portion of the AP economics exam. (I could say it was just that boring, but the blame really falls on a misbehaving alarm clock).

Anyways, let's dive into the actual review. There were 3 core subjects, microeconomics, macroeconomics, and econometrics, and we just took them simultaneously through the year.

Microeconomics with Gary Becker, Kevin Murphy, Hugo Sonnenschein, and Roger Myerson. For those of you who don't know, this is a ridiculous tag team of legendary awesomeness.

Just as I have known since high school that I didn't like macroeconomics, I have known since high school that I loved microeconomics, and not just pieces of it. We were all warned, I think, that the first year of grad school would be a painful this-isn't-what-I-thought-economics-was, this-isn't-what-I-came-here-to-study experience, a bootcamp that students just have to weather until they can move on to what they actually care about. But personally I found this year to be relatively free of such meta-revelations. The micro sequence was exactly what I thought it would be (just as the macro seqence exactly wasn't what I thought it wouldn't be), and it's exactly what I came here to study. There was not a bit of the micro sequence that I didn't enjoy, which I guess makes me lucky. I thought the classes were thoroughly interesting and really not that difficult. That said, I definitely did not have time to learn everything (or really anything) to the level I would have liked...but only because I had to put a large amount of time into other subjects that did not come so easily.

Macroeconomics with Fernando Alvarez, Nancy Stokey, and Casey Mulligan. Sigh. I really just don't like macroeconomics. Mostly, I'm just not interested in the stuff they're studying, although I'm not a big fan of the way they go about studying it either. Please don't interpret this as a knock on either count, just a statement of my personal preferences. I am simply not interested in the unemployment rate, and it makes me a little sad that when I tell people I'm in economics, they assume I must actually know or care about the macroeconomy. (This assumption is eminently understandable, but unfortunate nonetheless). Personally, I really don't enjoy navigating the sea of macroeconomic algebra, nor do I much care about what's on the other side anyways. There is nothing for me here.

I knew macro wasn't going to be fun, though a big honorable mention goes to the first half of Stokey's quarter, where we took some time out of our usual programming (swimming in the algebra sea) to investigate Bellman equations, which I hereby declare Awesome. (Don't worry, it's not like Bellmans are actually macroeconomic objects. I once had a friend who just loved to play with my toys, maybe even more than I did...but they were still my toys). In truth there have been many "macro" topics I liked over the years, but whenever they arise, invariably a pretty good argument can be made that they aren't really macro. This is not weaseling -- I would be quite happy to simply divide economics into "stuff I like" and "stuff I don't like" -- but the fit has been so perfect that I may as well continue to use "micro" and "macro" to describe my preferences. Next.

Econometrics with Susan Schennach, Lars Hansen, Harald Uhlig, Derek Neal, and Ali Hortacsu. Econometrics is basically economic statistics, a body of theory and methods specially adapted for answering economic questions from the kinds of datasets economists typically deal with. What to say about metrics? Undoubtedly the area in which I was least prepared coming in, and also in which I learned the most, although a fair bit of that learning did not come till rather late in the game. Whereas micro and macro did not particularly surprise me, metrics was rather paradigm-shifting. But it really took looking back on everything once I had seen it all. I simply had no structure to put in, the first time around.

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So that's the overview of the classes. Putting it all together...well in truth putting it all together is a really bad idea. These classes fought bitterly, desperately for my time. An epic battle. There was a point in the 2nd quarter where Professor Sonnenschein said, "I know this is a brutal quarter, I know you're getting an extra huge amount of work from everyone else, but that just means that if I don't follow suit, you're not going to spend any time on my class." He was right, of course, and that was about the time I stopped reading blogs and doing crossword puzzles. Yes, for those of you keeping score at home: that is my definition of a truly epic battle.

Nor did the battle stop when classes finished. We then had 6 weeks to study for our qualifying exams. Before this year, I don't think I'd studied more than a few days for any exam in my life. But believe me when I tell you that 6 weeks is not a long time, not for the material on these exams. If (like me) you had never seen most of this stuff before, and if (like me) you were not bright enough to have soaked it all up on the first pass, then in fact those were probably the most productive 6 weeks of your life.

Here's the deal with the qualifying exams: If you pass em, you get to move on to the next year. If you fail an exam, then you have to repeat that class. If you fail 2 or 3 exams, you have to do the whole year over. My top priority going into the studying period -- which by now should come as no surprise -- was to pass macro. So I spend about half the time on macro. By contrast I spent a couple weeks on metrics and 4 days on micro.

I would have loved to spend more time on micro, but I couldn't have justified it. I didn't have the luxury of actually trying to do well on any of these exams. Besides the fact that I had understood the micro material relatively well as it whizzed past, a really nice feature of the micro exam is that half the test is made up of these Becker-Murphy intuition questions, like 10 of them, which function as a variance sink. Over ten unrelated short questions you're going to do about the same each time, so if you can generally do well on them, then you don't have to worry about getting screwed over by a bad bunch of questions on the exam. By contrast, the macro exam was just 3 giant questions and it could so easily have gone south if you weren't comfortable with them.

4 days was enough time to brush up on the micro topics of the year. It was not enough time for me to get nearly as sharp (on anything) as I had been earlier in the year. But that is the way of things.

Results:
Well, they tell us almost nothing, like really only that we passed. But I have a pretty good sense of how I did on the exams.

I got lucky with an unexpectedly easy macro exam, and I'm pretty sure I destroyed it. 'Twas prophesied from the beginning, you know, that in our final encounter one of us would have to destroy the other. Obviously neither of us can live while the other survives, and it was definitely a relief to find out which way the fight would go.

As for micro, I did *okay*. I thought it was harder than any of the practice tests I took, and I certainly could have done a lot better, but...whatever. Nothing to be ashamed of.

And metrics...did not go so well, although I was hardly alone, and it really is relative performance that matters. As exams go, I thought it did a particuarly poor job of measuring how much I had learned, so I'm glad it ended up okay. The goal of these exams is largely to separate the main body of the class from the bottom. But this exam seemed to self-consciously produce an extremely noisy signal, even worse than the usual metrics qualifying exam. Questions were thrown away by asking things almost nobody knows the answer to...

(In fairness, high variance can keep people on their toes and force them to learn more stuff, so as to minimize the chance of getting unlucky. But if you overdo it -- and I think here it has been thoroughly overdone -- it can also have the perverse effect of making students say, "Hey, no matter what I do, I'm not going to get many points on Professor XYZ's question, so what's the point of spending much time on that material?")

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Overall impression: This was an incredibly productive and ultimately enjoyable year, one that I would not have fastforwarded through even if I could, notwithstanding the complaints registered above. It flew by incredibly fast, both in terms of too-much-material-to-comprehend-in-the-given-time and my perception of the passage of time (a sentiment others generally seem to agree upon. I would think, ahead of time, that it would be a slow, painful year of slogging...but actually the weeks zipped by). All together it was an almost 11-month endeavor, from "math camp" for incoming students in early September to qualifying exams spanning July. I would do it again if I had to, and I would certainly learn things a lot better on the second pass...but I'm glad to be finished and excited to move on in the program. Year 2 starts in a week.

Spot the Difference

noreply@blogger.com (Xan) — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 23:30:00 +0000

Greetings earthlings,

I know it's been a while since I've updated. In fact it's been a while since I did anything at all besides schoolwork. Ah well, that's life lately. I was going to write a year-in-review post but most people would probably find it less than interesting and it really doesn't fit on this blog. So let me just say that I had an amazing year, and we'll leave it at that.

Today I want to revisit something, this time emphasizing its supreme usefulness (with applications to crossword puzzles! umm, and other useful things). But first, a magic trick.

You know those Spot the Difference pictures where you try to pick out the differences between two side-by-side photos? For example, check out this site:
Spot the Difference
If you like, take a few moments to try some of those photos. It's a nice site that regenerates different discrepancies each time you play. You click on them when you find them, and it will even time you.

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Interlude
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How did you do? Under a minute? Under 5 minutes? Did you even finish before getting bored and giving up? There is a bit of randomness involved; sometimes the discrepancies are obvious, sometimes they can be quite subtle.

Like most magic tricks, this tends to be a lot more impressive in person, but I guess I'll just tell you: I can do all of these in about 5 seconds, every time. And the question is, how?

Before you think too much, take this as fact: I do not know all the different discrepancies the computer could generate, nor is there some similar cheap trick. I am not using any special technology. I am playing spot the difference, with all the same information as you. I just have a good way of handling that information, a way that makes spotting the difference trivial. How?

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Hint: Information goes from the screen to the eyes to the brain. If you are like most people, you have basically put your brain in charge of spotting the differences. By contrast, I have given most of the work to my eyes.
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Hint: I did say we're revisiting an old topic...(see the labels on the sidebar).
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Okay then. The answer is that I treat the spot-the-difference photos as a stereogram, just like the turtle shell. That is, I look at the left picture with my left eye and the right picture with my right eye, and line them up. As a result, I see the two photos overlaid, and the differences manifest themselves as a characteristic jarring effect, the one we experience every time our eyes are not looking at the same thing. When the eyes mostly agree, the discrepancies really stand out, so indeed it becomes a trivial exercise to spot the differences. The differences are highlighted.

There you have it. I hope it seems obvious in retrospect (explained magic tricks tend to), although I've never known someone who figured out the answer completely on their own. But you should also realize that from my (admittedly particular) perspective, this is just low-hanging fruit and there's no reason I wouldn't have picked it. It isn't something I had to cleverly think up. I got it for free! When I see any sort of patterned material at all, my instinct is to verify whether it is or is not concealing a stereogram. And when I see two similar things next to each other, my instinct is to verify whether or not they are in fact identical. It's just a little habit I've had for as long as I can remember, one that is no more costly to me than "regular" looking around, one that often comes in handy, and one that occasionally uncovers delightful surprises. It's sort of like a metal detector, only I don't have to lug any equipment around.

We are always scoping out our world, checking things out from different angles, casually without thought. You should not think of this as a weird-crazy obsession (but of course I would say that). Rather, you should think of it as another way of seeing, one that I don't find any more costly than normal seeing. Extra information, for free? Sign me up. When I look at a tile floor, I see a repeated pattern and my instinct is to gaze past it until it lines up with itself. That reveals the small differences between the tiles, but also there is something nice, something relaxing, about staring past reality and having it make sense to your eyes anyways. (Normally when you focus your eyes on a point beyond where the object actually is, the brain returns an error message).

In any case, it's certainly another tool in the toolbox, and a supremely useful one at that, in my experience. A couple thousand years ago, this would have been supremely useless, but do you know how many identical or near-identical things there are in the modern world, and how often we actually care? I can think of a few recent examples where it came in at least a little handy.

1. Catherine was purchasing bug spray, and she found 2 cans that seemed to be the same, but they were different colors so she wasn't sure. So she asked, "Is there anything different about these?" (Sounds like a job for Spot-the-Difference Man!). It took seconds to determine that the products were the same: all the words, including the list of ingredients, can be compared instantly using the stereo method. The only difference was that one had a 7 in the barcode where the other had an 8, and the conclusion was that they have recently updated the color of the bottle.

2. I was in an Asian supermarket and trying to tell the difference between two bags of dried mushrooms whose packaging and labels looked superficially the same to me. If it's hard to find the differences between large blocks of English text, it's reallllly hard to tell the differences when they're in Chinese (which doesn't even use symbols I already have stored in my brain). But at least I could verify pretty easily that the ingredients were, in fact, different...although I had no idea what the differences actually were.

[I find this one cool in light of the first hint above, about using your eyes versus your brain to do most of the work telling the difference. Think how hard it would be to memorize a string of Chinese characters, not knowing Chinese: that's basically what you're doing when you try to compare text across objects, albeit using extremely short term memory. That's pretty difficult for the brain. By contrast, the eyes handle Chinese no differently than English.]

3. I was making a crossword puzzle recently. As one fills the grid, there are inevitably difficult choices to be made: What's better, a puzzle with STEPSON OLIVE ECKO SHED SEN or a puzzle with IDEAMAN AMICI OCTO RHEA TEN? I have to take one batch or the other batch, because the words within the batch are what fit with each other. IDEAMAN is better than STEPSON, but OLIVE is better than AMICI, but TEN is better than SEN and is ECKO too hard for this puzzle? When I am comparing two similar versions of the puzzle like this, I will put the grids side by side, give an eye to each of them, and then I can see all the places where the words are different at a glance. When I changed ARTIST to ASSIST, here are all the changes that rippled through the grid. Here are all candidates to be compared. Amongst the solid, constant letters are the shimmering doubles, ready to collapse into version 1 or 2 at my command, which is like totally awesome, right? That's what I think, anyways.

OK that's what I've got for you today, some random recent examples you may or may not feel would apply to you. But if you think that in your life this wouldn't regularly come in handy in some way, you are probably about as correct as anyone is when they say, "Gosh, no one ever used this word before but now that I've learned it I hear it all the time!" I'm not saying it would necessarily be worth the effort, but it sure is nice if you can get to the point where it's effortless.

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By the way....

People are scarcely aware of all the incredible things their eyes can tell them. For example, did you know you can actually detect the polarization of light?

Ease

noreply@blogger.com (Xan) — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 04:12:00 +0000

The most important aspect of parkour is also the hardest to notice.

When you search for "parkour" on youtube, you will also find a ton of free running videos mixed in there. Parkour and free running are closely related; they're both about moving through an urban environment and they share the same core techniques, but they differ greatly in objective. Parkour is about moving efficiently wherever you want or need to go, while free running is more about aesthetics and acrobatics. So, free runners do a lot of flips and fancy things that aren't really parkour because they don't accomplish a pragmatic goal. Personally, I find the subtleties of parkour more interesting to watch, but that's what they are --- subtleties --- so how would the non-parkourist even know what to look for? Today I want to communicate something of the value of parkour that may not be so obvious to the uninitiated.

To that end, let's go back to this video:

This is one of the few pieces of footage I have of myself, and it's not supposed to look like much. A short wall and a mid-sized wall. But this is real bread-and-butter stuff, and I'm immensely happy to have it. Today I just want to highlight a few things that will hopefully get across the philosophy of parkour.

Parkour certainly opens up access to places I wouldn't be able to reach without it, but this is not an example of that. The majority of parkour involves traversing obstacles that anyone could handle (e.g. getting from one side of a railing to the other), but doing so in a quick, clean and efficient way. In other words, it enables us to do normal things better. It would not be difficult to clamber up onto the first "wall" in the video, but the parkour way is superior for the following reasons:

First, it enables me to run at whatever speed for the entire time leading up to the obstacle. This part isn't even in the video, but it shouldn't be forgotten. No matter how fast I run, the foot will keep me from smashing into the wall, so there's no need to slow down. In fact, it's even better than that, because the foot enables me to convert my speed into vertical energy. The faster I'm going, the more friction I can get off the wall, and the less vertical I have to attain via the comparatively difficult channels of jumping and pulling up with the arms. As it happens, in this case I actually could have jumped up onto the wall, but I don't for two reasons: Jumping is both energy-intensive and dangerous. From an energy standpoint, it's much easier to "walk" up the wall than to clear it with a tremendous leap. And from a safety standpoint, the parkour method excludes the possibility of clipping one's feet on the wall and face-planting into the concrete. In parkour it is rare that an obstacle is traversed by simply clearing it; generally speaking, it's good policy to maintain contact with a physical object whenever possible (a point of philosophy not exactly shared by free runners). The arms provide this contact, stabilizing the body as the legs come around. If you wanted to jump directly up onto this wall, and you wanted to avoid clipping your feet, you would have to clear it by a large safety margin, using even more energy. By contrast, I am bent over the wall, my center of mass is low, if something went wrong I wouldn't have far to fall, and it can't go wrong anyways because I have two hands on the wall and at no point in time am I aerial/out of control. See what makes this good?

And that was just the first wall. By way of transition, note that just as the parkour method did not impede the flow coming into the first wall, coming out of it I am already in a position to seamlessly continue my run. In this manner, moving through the environment becomes less like a collection of disjointed challenges and more like one uninterrupted circuit. Now to the second wall. As I said before, this is a midsized wall, about 8 or 9 feet (By contrast this ceiling weighs in at 10.5 feet). It's short enough that I can get over it easily with a leisurely run-up and no real arm pull-up.

There's a hierarchy here. To get up the highest possible wall, I would have to run as fast as possible at it, then jump as high as possible, then (having barely grabbed the top) pull myself up as far as possible. As the wall height decreases, the first thing I want to do is take weight off the arms. Arms are comparatively weak, and pulling oneself up is slow. So when possible, I get enough juice out of the run-up and jump so that I still have momentum when my arms engage. A complete pull-up is sort of a two stage process, and in this case I only have to do the second half, which in my mind is what classifies it as a mid-sized wall. It's hard to get a sense of scale when you aren't standing there, but pay attention to where my foot hits the wall. From there, it's not much farther to the top.

There's plenty of stuff I'm not going to talk about (what parts of my body do and do not make contact with the wall, the complete role of the hands/arms and feet/legs in getting over...the pulling-up process is actually rather complex, but this is not the right video to analyze it with). Here's what I want to discuss right now. First, I'm not getting over this wall as fast as possible. That is sometimes the goal, but in this particular clip it's more like I'm going as slow as I possibly could without using more energy. Yes, it would take more energy to do it faster, but it would also take more energy to do it slower (think about doing pushups in slow motion). This particular clip should really communicate ease.

Second, I'm trying to convey that everything makes an enormous amount of sense. There are no random elements. I can see how parkour might look like a disordered and reckless activity to the uninitiated, but in reality it is quite controlled. Our objective is not to maximize speed, efficiency, or safety, but rather some mix of these things. The remarkable thing is how often these three goals are more or less aligned, of which this video is a pretty good example. Notably, that possibility goes out the window when you add a fourth objective of acrobatics (I am not bashing free running, but do notice the way it moves away from each of these objectives).

So yes, parkour opens up new possibilities, and maybe that's what people want to see on youtube, but really the best thing about it is the way it turns the merely unimpossible into the easy. It's hard to compare, but I would say that at the end of this sequence, I am no more tired than I'd be if I had taken the stairs. It is certainly quicker, and while some muscles have been used more, others have actually been used less.

I leave you with one of my favorite parkour videos, just some footage from a little training space:
Discovering the space

Statement of non-purpose

noreply@blogger.com (Xan) — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 03:26:00 +0000

By the way, I hope it's clear that the point of this "blog" is not to add short and easily digestible items to your RSS feed! I would be more comfortable knowing that you know that I know that this material is often dense and not everyone (or even most) will find everything (or even most things) interesting. So long as it's common knowledge...

Youtube is mostly used by people looking for free hosting for videos, not as a platform to wide viewership. And blogger is mostly used by people looking for free hosting for their websites.

On the topic, I have two youtube videos riding opposite sides of the spectrum. One has over a hundred thousand views...

...and one has (at this moment) 134 views...

Youtube+blogger=free website with everything I need. For now.

Practicality and aesthetics

noreply@blogger.com (Xan) — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 01:50:00 +0000

Since the recent post on absolute pitch the subject has been more consciously in my mind. I'm reminded that it does turn out to be useful here and there, so perhaps I was a little hard on it before.

A few minutes ago, for example, I had Mozart's 25th stuck in my head. Only, I don't really know them by number (or any name I guess). How do you track down a piece of classical music with no lyrics to google? This could be frustrating!

Fortunately, I remembered it quite accurately (actually it would be weird to forget something this famous), and fortunately classical pieces like to have their keys right in the title ("Symphony No. 25 in G minor"). And then there is just a short list of well-known Mozart pieces in G minor. So in the end I found it quickly (on youtube).

Well now that I've written that, it's clear we're still not talking about a particularly awesome contribution to my wellbeing. Should I stand by my earlier comments? Is absolute pitch a total lightweight?

The reality is that I don't know. Absolute pitch is not very practical, so if it's doing something significant for me, then we must be talking about aesthetics. The really essential question would be: Does it increase my enjoyment of music? Do I appreciate music more, now that I hear more of certain details? I can say that I am bothered when things are in the wrong key, but does that mean I'm especially happy when they're right?

As far as I know, the claim is unfalsifiable. I have no meaningful way of comparing my appreciation of music today to my appreciation from 6 years ago, just as I can't compare happiness (or utility) across people. Introspection would seem to suggest an answer, but I have learned to be wary of such results. Even the relatively tone deaf are sometimes passionate about music; would it be a mistake to assume they are enjoying it less, holding all else equal? I don't know. But this is a topic for another time, another blog.

Crossword Jan 7, 2010

noreply@blogger.com (Xan) — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 15:31:00 +0000

It's the first Thursday of the new decade, and my crossword is out! Be warned, this post contains spoilers.

Some people have said such nice things about it! Here are a few sources of commentary:
Diary of a Crossword Fiend
Rex Parker
Ryan and Brian
Wordplay
Cruciverbalist

The completed puzzle itself:
Xwordinfo
(If you need an unsolved copy just ask me).

Now, story time! People have guessed at what entries triggered the idea for the theme. But actually this puzzle started with another puzzle, which I have posted on Orange's forum. If you liked today's puzzle, I hope you'll like that one as well. (If you're interested, do it before continuing!):
Companion puzzle

*
*s
*p
*o
*i
*l
*e
*r
*
*s
*p
*a
*c
*e
*

Now if you were to play the guessing game with that puzzle, you'd probably get it right. I started with jack and jacket being part of a suit, entertained the (im)possibility that it could be a rebus with an additional double clue for long enough to discover that jacks and carjackers both lift vehicles, and began the hunt for other matches. Quickly, I realized that it would be possible to find more rebuses, but impossible to find more that are related in any way. But you could argue that these rebus squares each have effectively 4 clues, so it's fair even with no central theme idea.

I pitched the idea to Nancy Salomon, who loved it and lent me her excellent judgment on which entries were great and which were unworthy (as I have said before, judgment is the real indispensable part of constructing...thanks Nancy!). But the puzzle was rejected from the NYT. Nancy had advised me that it was really more up Peter Gordon's alley, but by then the Sun was sadly setting.

Going through this process left me with a dead puzzle and a surprising insight. It turns out that we have a lot more power to find double clues than we would maybe expect. It's actually not that hard to take a word, delete some of it, and then be left with a new word that can take the same clue. In fact, the universe of possible clues is so large that when I'm unable to do it, I tend to suspect it's my own lack of imagination rather than the true absence of a good clue.

The JACK puzzle isn't a winner because it deletes the wrong stuff. The solution is to invert the problem: find a rebus with a pretty innocuous combination of letters, and delete the rebus instead of the stuff around it. Then the rebuses can easily all be the same, because you're getting rid of them instead of repeatedly coming up with more clues for them. It's important to realize just how much power the constructor has in this situation. I didn't start with the fortuitous, surprising discovery of a perfect ANT combo such as FANTABULOUS. To the contrary, I got to select PEST CONTROL as the perfect backdrop for my deletion theme, and then I simply selected a particularly friendly pest. Do you know how many words have ANT in them? (A lot!)

Assorted further comments:
What makes a friendly pest? I thought at first that RAT would be nice, but if you think about the letters that would surround ANT and RAT in a typical word, you realize it's much better if your pest doesn't both begin and end with a consonant.

There are many, many exclamation points on the page where I discovered FANTABULOUS. But again, it's unsurprising that I would find such a word, given the nature of ANT and how many words there are to choose from. It even has an evil twin, CANTANKEROUS, which was simply too gross to show itself.

Most disappointing moment in the theme development: Discovering that Bonnie and Clyde didn't actually have a chance to get married before they were gunned down, so WANTED wouldn't work for them. But I WANT IN was not far behind!

Inside pitch

noreply@blogger.com (Xan) — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 22:38:00 +0000

Section 1: Absolute pitch
A brief note on notes: You could call the actual pitch of a note -- how high or low it is -- its absolute pitch. The relative pitch of a pair of notes is basically the distance between them. If you know the absolute first note (or really any note) of a song and you know the pitch of all the other notes relative to that note, then you know the absolute pitch of the whole song. In this essay I will use knowing the "first note," "key," and so forth as shorthand for knowing the absolute pitch of the whole song. I don't really like "key" for this purpose but I shall nevertheless use it repeatedly for ease.

I do not have perfect pitch (also called absolute pitch) in its purest form. I do have a good memory for musical content, including the absolute pitch of things I'm familiar with. When the Universal Studios theme comes to mind, I remember it in some detail -- including its key -- without reference to anything other than my own memory of the theme.

First things first. How good is it? How precise am I with absolute pitch? This question turns out to be a little too simple. I am limited by two things, namely my ear and my memory.

First, pitch is a continuum and there is no such thing as perfect measurement. Everyone is limited by the sensitivity of their own ear, including people with "perfect" pitch. Some people, especially those for whom music was an integral part of their childhood, have particularly sensitive ears. As for my own ear, it's a good bit better than average, but it is far surpassed by many musicians.

Second, my memory for music is like my memory for anything else. Things come and go, and are recalled with varying degrees of certainty according to a number of factors, including how often and how recently I've heard a piece. It is possible to forget the key of a song I feel I should know, just as it is possible to temporarily forget a word I feel I should know. And just as it is sometimes possible to recover a word by thinking of similar words or a sentence in which the desired word would appear, it is often possible to recover a lost key by thinking about the song in certain ways -- for example by playing back different parts of it in my head in search of something that jogs my memory, or playing back the song that comes before it on an album if I happen to remember its key (and am feeling particularly sneaky and motivated). And however imprecise my memory may be, I am quite unlikely to think a familiar song took place 2/3rds of an octave higher than it did, just as I will never overestimate my dad's age by more than a few years despite the fact that I am never able to remember his precise birthday (an asymmetric but integral part of our relationship).

What I'm trying to communicate is that this is a guessing game like everything else. In the end, I am always left with a guess and some degree of certainty that I'm right (or really, a probability distribution for the actual key of the song). When the memory is particularly strong, I'm as precise as my ear allows me to be. If I heard something only once a couple years ago, I probably won't remember it (or its key) at all. "On average" is not meaningful since there is an entire spectrum of songs from those with which I'm intimately familiar to those I don't even remember ever hearing. If I had to take a stab at quantifying it, I'd say there's maybe one or two thousand songs I could call the key of within half a semitone at any given moment. The cutoff is of course arbitrary; on a better-known subset of these, I would be much more accurate. Anything that shows up as frequently in life as the Universal Studios theme is quite unlikely to be messed up by any perceptible amount (to my ear).

The best way to take stock of where I am is probably to talk about where I came from. If someone tells you they have perfect pitch, they usually mean they can hum any note on command and conversely name any note that you play. On the other hand, I never learned to associate the names of the notes -- C, D, E, etc. -- with their sounds. I had a few piano lessons when I was a kid but I didn't really enjoy them and I never took to the whole reading sheet music thing, finding it laborious and preferring to simply remember the music I was playing (of course it was never very complicated to begin with). I never paid much attention to the official names of the particular keys I was pressing, and I didn't keep at it too long anyways.

And then nothing musical, for many years. So it was a thoroughly new undertaking when, towards the end of high school, I decided to take up the guitar. I took it pretty seriously through the first couple years of college (though it eventually took a back seat to schoolwork and other enterprises). By the beginning of college, I had started to notice that I was remembering the keys of songs. Sometimes I would be whistling a song that popped into my head, turn to iTunes to play it, and find that I had the key right. At first I was quite skeptical, suspecting confirmation bias. But as I paid attention to it, the ability really seemed to be getting stronger, more frequently accurate. It was getting too big to ignore, so I decided to step back and apply Science. I started testing myself. I would go through iTunes, picking out songs I knew well but hadn't heard in a while to see how close I could get. I was doing better and better by the week. There were many things to rule out; for example, I worried that maybe I just subconsciously knew how all the songs fit together relatively, so that knowing one would lead to knowing the others without any need for absolute pitch within an iTunes session. Frequently I woke up in the morning correctly humming a song I'd heard while falling asleep, but I worried that my brain had just been humming it all night and remembered it that way. I'll spare you the details, but careful applications of Science have determined these explanations to be impossible (anyone who is curious can certainly inquire, but I'm running long already). So, the tests have been done. What's left when the impossible has been eliminated?

Well, I said before that I never learned the names of the notes when I played the piano. Nor did I ever pay attention to the names of the notes when playing the guitar either, because the guitar is the king of relativity (see Section 2 below), which is why I love it. On the other hand, each song is a recognized object, it has its own "signature" or "name" (not to be confused with the actual title of a song, e.g. "Stairway to Heaven." The distinction of whether or not I know the title of a song is immaterial). The suggestion is that I have learned a name for the key each song is in, or equivalently a name for the first note of each song, or for that matter a contextual name for each note in each song. It's not a very efficient naming system --- indeed, you might say that for every note I have hundreds or thousands of names! But the right way to think about it is really less as some perverted form of perfect pitch, and more as a refined version of normal music memory. The average person remembers something about the actual pitch of a song, not nothing. If you heard a song transposed up an octave, you would likely detect the discrepancy immediately. In fact, some preliminary experimentation suggests that when you ask people to guess at the pitch of songs they know, they tend to be remarkably close, generally much closer than we or they would expect.

To further illustrate the situation, let me point out the very first thing you would think of if you found yourself in my position. You would say, "Hey, I guess it's not traditional perfect pitch, but I could take 12 different songs that start on different notes, learn the real names of the notes they start on, and use them as references for the notes. But why even bother with that? I only need to know one song, and I can figure everything else out relatively. Then don't I effectively have perfect pitch?"

And so if you ask me to whistle a C, with a moment's thought I can do a pretty good job. And furthermore, the more I think about it, the better I will do (or, the more likely I am to do well. Even if I am very sure, I can always check my work). Because in fact, there is a difference between knowing one song and knowing many songs, and in fact, I know the real notes of many songs (because I know how to play them on my guitar, and I can visualize the fretboard and figure out what notes are involved). We're playing a probability game, after all, and the more measurements you let me take, the more accurate my average is expected to be! What information will I use? It changes from day to day, based on what I've been playing recently and what happens to pop into my head at the time. As for results, on several occasions I've met someone with perfect pitch and we played the "hum a G on the count of 3 game" successfully each time, so it seems I can blend in just fine.

I've become aware that note references are not limited to songs so much as iconic sounds, and sometimes these come from the oddest places. For instance, I listen to a weekly podcast, Fill Me In, on which Ryan either semiregularly or biregularly plays a C chord. Lately I have found myself consulting my memory for this chord, which stands out to me perhaps because I don't play piano and don't have any other competing isolated piano chords floating around in my brain to confuse me. You might wonder, if I can do a C chord why not just a C? In principle, there's no problem with single notes; for example, I am starting to internalize the beeping of my new alarm clock even though it only ever beeps when I'm barely conscious. The requirement seems only to be that the sound or collection of sounds have a unique signature to latch onto (something to identify it by), although in practice more complex objects make more substantive references because there are more ways to cross-check their accuracy.

Nor is the ability a one-way street, although what I've been describing above is the direction I use most often. It is also true that when people play songs in the wrong key, I get mildly bothered. It's hard to describe, but I just get a strong sense that the song is not as it should be; conversely there is something particularly satisfying about hearing a song in the right place (but either way I try not to let the discrepancies bother me). Another way it manifests is that I will be playing some random note or chord on the guitar, and it will remind me of a real song that actually contains that precise note or chord. This is not something I can invoke or control -- it just happens sometimes, and its only real advantage is that it gives me something to play next. It would be really awesome if I could play a note and call up all the songs that start with that note, but my memory is not organized in a way that makes such a lookup possible.

What's still a mystery is the mechanism by which this ability developed. I can say that the development period was marked by a growing amount of music listening in my life together with the active involvement of playing an instrument. Would one of these alone have been sufficient? What role did self-testing/training play? Another thing I can say is that lately all of these features have declined somewhat and I have noticed a corresponding decline in my ability as well (it's still strong but not as quick and precise as it was a couple years ago. I find myself taking more averages to be sure). This would be surprising if you thought of it like someone forgetting their primary colors --- that would be the way to think about regular perfect pitch but it's probably not what applies here. It's less surprising if you remember that I'm not in touch with 12 permanent sounds so much as a sizeable and shape-shifting music library complete with temporary checkouts, new additions, and a serious dust accumulation problem. Sadly, we lose touch with many things we once knew well, but the truth is that as abilities go, this one is both particularly fascinating and particularly useless to me...for reasons to be discussed in Section 2.

Section 2: Relative Pitch
NOTE: Unlike absolute pitch, my sense of relative pitch has been with me for as long as I can remember. It's as good an example of natural ability as anything else I can think of. Nevertheless, this topic is not nearly so fascinating as the above. You may appreciate the window into my mind if you are interested in this sort of thing, but for many people this would not be a bad place to stop. Disclaimer aside, it's still written at a level that assumes very little about your knowledge of music.

So, I have something like absolute pitch. But actually it doesn't help me to play at all, because it's not instantaneous or perfectly reliable, whereas I have a better alternative that's both of those things. Absolute pitch might tell me the starting note of a song if I need it (as in, if I don't have a recording on hand but I want to play it in the original key, and I don't happen to already know where to play it on the guitar. This almost never happens, and is especially almost never necessary), but after that, all my mental processes fall in the domain of relative pitch. When I say I "understand" music, I am talking about relative pitch.

Relative pitch is the relationship between the notes in a song, and that's the really indispensable, defining charactertistic of a piece of music. If you shifted all the notes up or down by the same amount, you would still recognize it as the same song. Having a good sense of relative pitch is to know very concretely how a song fits together. I notice when someone plays the wrong chord of a song I know. Conversely, I can easily figure out how to play a song for myself, from a recording or memory. I can whistle and play a random melody at the same time, or alternatively, when I'm about to play a note, I know what it's going to sound like before I hear it (these are equivalent if you think about it). This is not the only type of musical understanding, but it's the only one I can really relate to. From my perspective, if you don't know what sound you're about to make, then how do you know it's the one you want? (One alternative that comes to mind: Knowing what sounds good ex post is still possible even if you can't anticipate the sound ex ante. If you know that a particular sort of chord sounded good in similar past situations, then you can guess that it will sound good here as well, even though you don't know what it's going to sound like until you play it.)

I'm trying hard to describe something I'm not used to making explicit. I suppose it could be said that when I hear a melody, I implicitly detect the "scale" that the notes of the melody belong to (if that happens to make sense in the context -- but really something slightly deeper but harder to describe is going on), and then I can conform my playing to go along with the melody. The scale is defined by the relative gaps between the notes that make it up; in order to extract the relative relationship of the notes from the sounds you're hearing, you just need a sense of relative pitch.

So when I play with people, they will often ask me things like, "What key is it in?" From my perspective, this step is so oddly unnecessary that I am never prepared to answer it off the top of my head. If they started to play something, without any thought I would detect the scale or chord structure or whatever was necessary to characterize it -- but in terms of the tones themselves, not the names of the notes. If I needed to, how would I find the name of a note? Well, I could match the identified tone on my guitar and figure out what note it was from its location on the fretboard...but by then I've already figured out how to play it and that's what I needed to play along in the first place, right? Anything else is unnecessary except as a point of communication. In fact I don't know the names of most of the notes on the fretboard just from looking at them, because I usually have no need for them; of course, I can figure them out if necessary, but it takes an extra step of reasoning.

Please don't get me wrong on this. There's great value to knowing the language of music, and if I had the time, I'd go a lot further with it. I'd learn to play lots of instruments and I'd learn plenty of music theory and reading music would become quick rather than laborious. I would devote many lifetimes to music if I could. But instead there are many interests competing for a very limited amount of time. According to the timesheet I have only just dabbled in a great many things, and along the way I'm particularly glad for anything that makes my forays relatively easy and my progress more extensive than the timesheet would suggest. On this blog I like to stress the importance of putting in the hours, but it's also true that if you're going to play this kind of game, it helps to have some aces up your sleeve, and it helps to pick your activities so that you'll have a chance to play them.

Patience

noreply@blogger.com (Xan) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 19:01:00 +0000

Dear all,

The first year of econ grad school is a particularly busy time. When it comes to getting in shape, there is apparently no better way than taking impossibly long runs through an unfamiliar environment, being forced to keep up because falling behind means getting lost and never making it to where you're trying to go (subject to a feasibility constraint).

This is bad news for the blog, and for anyone who wants a slice of my mental energy. So, if I am worse than usual at staying in touch etc, please be patient. The idea is to accept a little less now, for a lot more later. If I fail the qualifying exams at the end of the year, then I have to repeat the year over again, and then everyone's out 2 years of regular Xan. If you really value our time together, then you should value our time apart.

UPDATE: In the meantime, you can catch me in much smaller doses over at Two cents a point.

UPDATE 2: Apparently I am incapable of delivering up my brain in small doses...so much for that. I wasn't satisfied so Two cents a point is closed for now.

Undressing the blindfolded

noreply@blogger.com (Xan) — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 03:59:00 +0000

People are often surprised to learn that I can solve a Rubik's cube blindfolded. But, it's just another real-life magic trick, as I have called them before. Are you one of those people who thinks of this as a mythical feat, a "pinnacle ability"? If so, then read on. The purpose of this post is to correct this misconception. I am hoping to demystify the activity and communicate approximately how it's done. I'm not saying it's easy, exactly. But like many of the things I do, it is vastly easier than it seems.

So, let's get started. On a standard 3x3 Rubik's cube, there are 6 center faces that don't move relative to each other, 8 corner pieces, and 12 edge pieces. Solving a cube means putting the corner and edge pieces in the right place relative to the centers, and orienting them properly. Blindfolded solving means looking at the cube, memorizing the starting position, and then not looking again until it's completely solved.

That's a fair amount of information, right? 12 edges (each with 2 possible orientations), and 8 corners (each with 3 possible orientations). But...given however long you required, you could memorize the starting position. And before you resign yourself to the conclusion that it would probably take an hour to reliably memorize the starting position alone, I'm going to assert that most people have very little idea about how well information can be encoded into pieces their brains can handle. With the proper why-the-hell-are-these-not-taught-in-schools techniques, this feat is easily within your grasp.

Does remembering where a bunch of colors appear seem particularly daunting? I think so -- what luck, then, that it's not what I do. For simplicity, let's focus on one aspect of the solve: positioning the 8 corner pieces properly (ignoring orientation). People typically learn to associate each corner with a number from 1 to 8. If it's within your power to memorize an 8-digit number, you've got the ability to remember the starting position of the corners; you just look around the cube in a systematic fashion and remember the order in which the numbers come up. In fact, my short term memory isn't so great, so I use a system to help me do this faster and more reliably. In my head, I have this memorized route through my house with a number of stops (at the threshold, on the couch in the TV room, at the kitchen table, etc). And I have an object that stands for each number (for example, 2 might be a shoe, 3 a tree, and so forth). So to remember a string of numbers, I can just imagine walking along my route and seeing a particular object at each stop. But this is just one of many possible ways. (This particular technique has been around since antiquity, so again, why aren't we taught this stuff in school? So useful.)

Anyways, so you can definitely memorize the initial position of the corners. How long would it take you? A minute? 2 minutes? Probably less than 10. OK cool! But in the solving process, aren't you going to move everything around and have to keep track of all the changes? Imagine having to remember everywhere you're sending things every time you twist a side...

No, don't imagine that. That's another big reason people assume this is harder than it is. What I actually have is a small arsenal of move sequences that only affect a few pieces of the cube at a time. I know how to rotate corners 1, 2, and 3 among themselves without changing anything else on the cube. So, after performing this sequence, I don't have to worry about anything other than what's happened to the 3 pieces in question. Everything else stays exactly the same as it was before. No continual keeping track of where I've just sent all the cubies! I just shuffle the corners around until they're in the right place. In fact, for the most part, every piece stays in its initial position until it's time for it to move to its final position. You wouldn't know from watching, but in reality there is actually very little to keep track of during the solve.

On a technical note for the mathy, instead of remembering the corners' starting position, I'm actually remembering where they have to go. In my mind, I start with a cycle like (1 8 4 3 5 2 7 6), which means the corner in the 1st position goes to the 8th corner position, and that corner goes to the 4th position, which goes to the 3rd position, ... , and finally the corner in the 6th position comes around to the 1st position. I have at my disposal a set of moves that rotate 3 corners at a time. I am basically chipping away at the 8-cycle above by composing it with the appropriate 3-cycles (sometimes a little extra trickery is needed, but it can be ignored for our purposes) until everything is in its right place. And then we're done! The edge positioning is the same, and orientation is actually pretty easy on its own.

*
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1) I do want to get a little separation between complexity and inaccessibilty. Does all of this sound horribly complicated to you? Well, maybe, depending on your perspective. Building a house seems horribly complicated to me, yet I think we can agree that genius is not a necessary ingredient for house-building. There was a time when many people built their own houses, and now anyone can probably go to carpentry school and learn. How long would it take to learn how to build a house? I think if there was Rubik's-cube-blindfolded school, the time from enrollment to graduation probably wouldn't exceed a month. I learned in about a week and a half (though granted I could already solve a cube unblindfolded in under a minute). So, it may seem complicated to you as presented here, but with a little time, it would begin to make as much sense as many of the things in the "ordinary realm" of human activity.

My message is this: At no point in the solving process is superhuman mental ability required. The hard work goes into learning technically how to approach and manipulate the cube in the first place, and virtually anyone can make this knowledge a part of their long-term memory. OK?

Disclaimer: It was convenient to talk about this in the present tense, but the reality is it has been some months since I solved a cube blindfolded. It would probably take the better part of a plane ride to get back into solving shape, so I declare this skill officially archived.

2) Penn & Teller like to call themselves the "bad boys of magic," telling everyone how tricks are performed. But, they keep their lips sealed on the tricks they actually care about, such as the most beautiful illusion of all time. (I enjoy magic a lot, and usually it's just a fun game to figure out how things are done. But sometimes it becomes a legitimate form of art that I have no interest in dismantling. (By the way, I highly recommend Penn & Teller if you are ever in Vegas. The Rio isn't quite on the strip, but if you like magic, you won't find a show with more depth)).

On the other hand, I am most interested in revealing the inner workings of the tricks I care about most. Maybe because I find them the most interesting.

We art, we art, everywhere, nor any stop to think

noreply@blogger.com (Xan) — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 20:04:00 +0000

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By the way...

I took an art class in college. The first thing I noticed was that it takes an enormous amount of time while simultaneously not being exhausting like regular schoolwork. When I'm in an art project, I don't look at the clock. Eight hours go by in a sitting. Now, this is nothing new; if you happen to like art, you have probably had a similar experience, in or out of the classroom. But I did find that being in a class forced me to really think about the time I was spending, especially relative to my other classes. I know quite explicitly where I spent most of my time that semester.

So, if you thought that my schedule for the other day was ridiculous, make sure you are making the right comparison. It's really just art, you know. My free time is spent on all sorts of art projects, over the common denominator of creativity. Unfortunately, the all-engaging nature of creative endeavors is foreign to many people; if you are one of these people, then you may simply be unable to relate. But you should still believe in the phenomenon, and you should recognize that it's not actually that unusual, to spend 8 hours on a project without looking at the clock.

All subjects share in this engaging nature to the extent that they require creativity. For example, by college, mathematics finally starts to take on a flavor of creativity. If you are fortunate enough to get to that point, armed with a lot of fundamentals and a creative disposition, then you may find you spend a lot of time lying on the floor trying to prove things and neglecting all your other subjects that haven't really made it to the creative stage yet (*cough cough economics cough*). Constructing a proof is sort of like trying to figure out the perfect way to get a point across in a poem...in French. People tend to recoil in horror at the thought of doing either. But let's separate the knowing-French part from the writing-poems part. If you think that writing proofs is a horrifying prospect, maybe the problem is that you simply aren't fluent in the language to begin with. So even if you have deep "math aversion," perhaps you can accept that, conditional on fluency, proof-writing might actually be fun. If you're OK with people liking to write poems, then you really should be OK with people liking to write proofs.

I spent a week in the Bahamas over break, but I mostly just worked on my math thesis.

It wasn't imminently due or anything. I just wanted to. I mention all this to make the following point: What looks like work to you may simply not be work to somebody else. People like to think, X is clearly work, Y is clearly play, and if this person spends their time doing all X and no Y, well that must be pretty dull, huh? But maybe your work is my play, and while we're at it, maybe your play is my work too. (Depends how much you love parties, I guess). The reality is, I happen to do both a lot of disciplined work and a lot of unrestrained play. It would be a pretty fundamental error to look at my life and conclude that it's full of work.

Before you go ahead and mentally declare yourself innocent of this X&Y problem, consider one thing: How would you have reacted, if I had started this post by describing the contents of my wonderful week in the Bahamas, rather than building up to it in the particular way that I did? On its own, this must be alien to most people; it's certainly easier to just tell people I have a deadline to make. Compared to art, hopefully it becomes understandable to anyone who can relate to the raw experience of creativy. After that, there are still some people left over, but I suspect they might actually be outnumbered. And if that's the case, then who's the weird one, really?

Well, to be honest I really don't know who's outnumbered here. But it's just a bit of meaningless rhetoric anyways.

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By the way, since it's tangentially related, I will take this opportunity to address a topic you may have wondered about. Given certain comments above, why exactly am I a week away from entering econ grad school rather than math?

Math gets to the good bits first because it got a head start, not because it has more good bits.

I could leave it at that, but one more comment. I'm not completely certain I've made the "right" choice (seeing as certainty would be impossible), but "wrong" isn't bad, it's just less good. People worry too much about optimizing anyways. And by the way, since everyone around me has been panicking about what to do with their lives lately, it occurs to me: The harder it is to distinguish the better of several options, the more similar they probably are, and the less it really matters which choice you make. Why do the closest calls stress people out so much? I refuse to participate in this paradox.

Breadth

noreply@blogger.com (Xan) — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 16:00:00 +0000

I learned to throat sing a few years ago. If that's a new term for you, it loosely means "singing multiple notes at the same time." That's a bit misleading; in reality, we're always singing lots of notes at the same time, but usually the overtones are too faint for people to really pick out as distinct notes. Throat singing is just a way of isolating and amplifying one or more of the overtones so that several notes can be distinctly heard at once. Here's a video I just made:

(if you're having trouble picking out the melody, the second half is me whistling more or less the same thing. it's not the greatest example of whistling (sorry)...but whatever.)

My throat singing is closest to a "sygyt," though the reality is it's just whatever I came to by trial and error. I just decided to go into my basement (a good idea when you're planning to make weird/loud noises) and try things until it worked. I started hearing results almost immediately, and within 2 hours I could produce them consistently (although faintly). After a week, I had a pretty strong whistle on top of the base note.

From what I can tell from other people who have tried, I found throat singing much easier to pick up than average. Maybe it had something to do with my ear (at least it helps to be able to detect faint positive results in the beginning when you're flailing around in the dark). It may also have a lot to do with physical abilities of the mouth, which are probably helped by the fact that I have spent a good portion of my life walking around whistling. Whistling and throat singing aren't actually that different, or more precisely, there is a kind of throat singing and a kind of whistling that are pretty similar, and I was already familiar with the type of whistling (if you're interested, I am referring to a sort of whistling where you touch your tongue to the roof of your mouth. And by the way, if you flutter your tongue up and down betwen that position and a "normal" position, you can get the sound to flutter as well. There are some not-so-stellar examples of that in the video above...as well as some tongue-rolling).

I guess this is another example of a general willingness to experiment with new things. As I look now, there are plenty of sites to help you out with throat singing, but it's really only in the last couple years that they started to pop up. (Interestingly, the same was true of parkour for us. It's only in the last couple years that youtube really got littered with parkour videos).

Story time! The Folk Music Center in the Claremont village (adjacent to the Claremont colleges, where I was at the time) is Ben Harper's family music store. It was always one of my favorite places to go, because they have so many weird instruments you can play around with. So anyways, one day I was in there with my friends, and we were having a good time fooling around on the instruments, and I don't remember the circumstances but on the way out, it came to pass that I started to (quietly) throat sing. The whole place just stopped making noise --kinda weird-- and afterwards, Joel Harper (Ben's bro) said, "Cool, dude." So that's my throat singing story. Cool, dude.

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Oh I'm excited for the meta today. By the way, I hope you've been enjoying your time under the triangles. The meta always makes me think, and I hope you're getting some of the payoff as well.

It seems like a good time to ask why. The more novel the hobby or talent, the more likely someone will just out and say it: "WHY????" Sometimes I get this question directed more toward my general existence, or toward my entire talent set. Well OK, for one thing I do have different interests than most people, and I can defend my fortress all day on those grounds alone. But I want to talk about the bigger picture, the entire talent set.

I really do think it's apt to describe myself as a collector of hobbies and talents. The mentality is quite similar. Think of a coin collector: the individual coins may be interesting in their own right, but the collector is really much more interested in the act of collecting itself, together with ownership of a collection (which happens to consist of coins). So with me. I am acquiring a vast collection of talents, all of which I personally consider to be interesting, but I love the act of adding to the collection, and the collection itself is more valuable to me than the sum of its parts. So in part, throat singing is inherently cool to me, but I also deeply enjoyed the learning process, and furthermore I surely thought to myself, "Ooh, that would make a cool addition to my collection!"

How does a group of hobbies take on collective value? There are many possible ways. For one, it could be cool to go for a "complete set" within an area, such as someone who excels in a large number of instruments. However, that's not the kind of collector I am. I would describe myself as more of a "breadth" collector. To see what I mean, suppose I start with 1 talent, say, solving a Rubik's cube blindfolded. OK, that has some stand-alone value to me. Now, suppose I decide to add, say, guitar skillz to my collection. This also has its own stand-alone value. But look, together there is now a multidimensionality to them; they are quite "far apart" as skills go, and there's something cool about being able to do two very different things well. A collection can take on a quality of "breadth" that individual items cannot. I'm coming to think that breadth is responsible for most of the extra value I get out of having a collection.

Now, since there are so many dimensions to move along in the modern world, there are always new hobbies I could add to my collection that would increase its breadth considerably. Because I am personally interested in moving along a large number of such dimensions (and because I am correspondingly able, fortunately; see Thin ice all around), my collection has been growing in many directions for my entire life.

Thinking about it this way, it's clearly no accident that many of the items in my collection are so different from each other. As a non-example, I would love to be a piano whiz; it would certainly benefit me greatly. But I've already got a strong representative off in that direction (guitar), so I'm unlikely to invest too much energy in the piano when there are literally dozens of other uncharted directions I could go in at any one time. There is still (and always will be) so much newness just sitting there waiting to be explored. It is my nature to be drawn in new directions.

And one last comment. Along the way, I am adding both permanent skills (or skills that can easily be reacquired at a later date), and creating byproducts of these skills that will be with me forever. For example, I now have the ability to write, play, and record music if I should ever need it in the future, and I also have all the songs I have recorded in the past. So in the acquiring process, I am always thinking to myself, "The payoff for this potential new skill will extend well into the indeterminate future." And that's something to work toward in its own right.

Today's menu (a bit light on the food)

noreply@blogger.com (Xan) — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 04:24:00 +0000

In Keeping score I mentioned that I sometimes keep a schedule of my day. Today I am keeping track of my schedule so you can see.

My schedule, 8/22/2009:

First, some background from 8/21:

8/21
...working on the tail end of filling a sunday puzzle (have been working on it for the past week). Sundays are a bitch (I had a horrid experience this one time...), but I put in a day on the grid design and it's paying off with a relatively easy fill job. Filling until 4:30am. I set my alarm for 10am.

8/22

10am --- I am up on the first beep. I don't drink coffee, but it's easy to get up when you're excited about the schedule for the day. Still more filling to do, but I am CLOSE to completion.

12:00 --- The grid is filled, but I have a couple self-contained regions I want to hit up again to see if they can be improved further.

1:30pm --- success! I am now done with the fill. Normally, I would dive right into the cluing. But because my time is extremely limited right now (school starts on the 31st), I am trying something new. The grid is sent off to Linden (sis), who will clue the puzzle and get back to me, after which we will submit it to the NY Times. Cluing is her comparative advantage, and I am excited to move on to the next project of the day (see below).

1:38 --- It seems I've forgotten about breakfast/lunch. I was definitely hungry at some point, but I got distracted and then it went away. Off to remedy that.

2:00 --- Back again. More crosswords? No, actually. Last night Brendan Balke sent me a couple of piano tracks and I'm going to put some vocals over top. I think it's been at least a year since I recorded any music, so I am excited! (and the last thing we created in this fashion was a true work of Awesome).

8:45 --- I have been working pretty much nonstop all afternoon/evening, and I have completed the lyrics/melody construction for the song, and recorded a demo track in the process. I'm pretty psyched about it, so the next step is to record the polished vocals. I haven't yet decided whether it needs any guitar, but if so, I'll add that as well, then send the recording back to Balke in case he wants to make any changes.

9pm --- Writing the majority of this blog post.

9:30pm --- Dinner!

10 and beyond: I'm going to leave it at this, but I suspect I will start recording vocals tonight(I'm not a loud singer...). We will see though. If any of the clues come back to me from the sunday puzzle, then those are a higher priority.

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In the account above, there are unreported little 2 minute bits here and there (answered a few emails, talked to Catherine outside of meals, etc...boring stuff you don't need a play-by-play of), which I think probably added up to under 30 min. (which, if you've ever kept track of this sort of thing, is a very low number).

This is not an entirely typical day. In fact, there is significantly less padding to it than usual, because I had a particularly full agenda of exciting projects and not much time to do them. Also, I'm not saying this is necessarily an ideal day. You wouldn't want to pull these all the time, or certain people would quickly lose patience with you, among other things.

That said, it is a sort of day I enjoy and am accustomed to pulling. One drawback, in fact one of my big problems, is that this sort of schedule does not include any "consumption of information" anywhere on it. It is a somewhat unfortunate reality that I am enormously tempted to create from within my own head rather than to go outside of it and have a look around. For example, I didn't even look at today's NYT crossword puzzle (to be fair, the odds are still okay that I will do it some time soon...maybe 70%). Shouldn't a puzzle constructor be consuming daily a rich diet of current puzzles? Well, it would probably make sense to stay up on that stuff. But when I'm in the middle of an exciting project, it's very hard for me to pull myself away from it in order to do a puzzle or, say, read the news. So I get behind on things sometimes.

This could easily be defended as rational ignorance, but in honesty I'm not entirely sure it's optimal behavior.

In case you're wondering, I do consider writing these posts to be a highly productive activity, for all the reasons people normally cite regarding writing about their thoughts, etc. It also stands as a valuable record for me, and hopefully it has some value as a communication medium for all three of my readers.

Thin ice all around

noreply@blogger.com (Xan) — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 06:00:00 +0000

While we're at this, it's probably a good idea to point out there are many millions of things I'm no good at. But for the most part, my interests are aligned with my abilities, so it can give the illusion that I'm "good at everything." The illusion is delicately supported, and if we deviate even a little bit from my preferred program of activities, the cracks start to appear.

It is true that when I decide to try something new of my own volition, it almost always turns out pretty awesome. The interesting thing is, when it's something that someone else picks for me, which I would never have decided to do on my own ("Ooh, let's go ice skating!"), then the results tend to cast me as a much more normal person.

So when people ask, "Is there anything you aren't good at?" I tell them, yes, many millions of things, which is honesty, not modesty. But when they invariably ask me to name some examples, it's actually kind of hard because I haven't spent much time exploring and discovering the things I'm bad at, since they tend to be things I would never personally choose to do anyways (and in particular I rarely put enough time into something to prove myself gloriously bad at it, and so they say things like, "I bet you'd be good if you tried..."). Somewhere out there is a list of the millions of things I haven't tried but would fail at if I did, though of course I can't cite that list because, by definition, I don't know what's on it.

The muddled causality between my interests and abilities results in a selection problem that makes it very difficult for me to discern the underlying distribution of my abilities. But I don't think the mean is absurdly high. So do I owe my particular record to a rare alignment of interest and ability? Or is alignment actually pretty common?

It seems atypical for the two to be aligned so precisely, but I don't have a great idea of what characterizes normal. "I wish I could be good at X"...this seems like a pretty common sentiment, no? And there are plenty of people who, say, are good at math but dislike it anyways. Here's how I fare in these two categories. First, sure, I sometimes wish I was better at X, but usually only when I already happen to be good at X. Sure, I would be happy if I could jump higher (none of this "I wouldn't change a thing" business, but note that perfection isn't a necessary ingredient for contentness either), but I already have my 3ft vertical; as for ice skating, I simply have very little interest in it. And secondly, yes, there are plenty of things I'm good at but don't do, but that's not a statement about disliking them so much as it's indicative of my outside options. For example, I think I could have had a nice happy life as a (presumably starving) artist, whereas in fact I have spend almost no time on art in my life. That's a very different thing from actually disliking art even though you can draw some pretty pictures. So, as far as I can tell, my interests and abilities are pretty precisely aligned, whether this is common or rare.

So...that's suspicious. Maybe I'm simply programmed to reject and forget about the stuff I'm no good at, huh? I think there must have been some of that going on, early on. By now though, I suspect I would notice that kind of thing, because I'm actively looking for it. Then, maybe I have long since explored enough avenues to fine-tune my interests, and the things in my past are pretty good predictors of what I'll be good at in the future. The thing is that I could swear there are just these times when new stuff seems pretty uncorrelated with everything in the past, and it nevertheless works out. It feels like magic. So in all honesty, even though I know it's silly, I often think of myself as just a "lucky" person. Not that I play the slots, but whenever I can't think of a good scientific reason for something new to go my way, I say, "This will work out, because it always seems to." And it always seems to.

Maybe many things are largely determined by hard work, that great constant across so much of what I do, or at least across what I care about...which is just a bit of redundancy to drive the point home. But note that this simply has no relevance for things like being able to jump and clap my feet 3 times before landing.

Richard Feynman said, "So I found hypnosis to be a very interesting experience. All the time your saying to yourself, 'I could do that, but I won't'---which is just another way of saying that you can't." So my question is, if you're walking around on an ocean covered in ice, and it would give way if you stepped anywhere besides exactly where you choose to step, what's the difference between that and a solid sheet of ice?

The answer, I guess, is that someone could push you onto a bad spot. And so it turns out that if you are going to live this kind of life, it's pretty critical to be resistant to peer pressure and social norms that don't benefit your lifestyle. It's easy to do what you want when you have this underlying feeling that what you're up to is vastly more important than what other people think about what you're up to.

There's nothing wrong with going for a swim, but why swim when you can walk on water? and in that case, why walk when you can run? I made 4 puzzles this week. Things are accelerating.

Keeping score

noreply@blogger.com (Xan) — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 02:59:00 +0000

How easy is it for you to work hard?

Hard is having to think about working hard whenever you want to work hard. Making yourself work by constantly exerting "willpower" can get you out of a pinch (final exams fast approaching?), but it's not really sustainable for long periods of time. On the other hand, easy is working hard without even a passing thought. Arranging things so that you work hard naturally, habitually, as a matter of course---this requires more complex actions on your part, but ultimately it's the only real way to change your behavior in any lasting way, I think.

Do you want harder work to become the norm for you? That can be your goal, but you should realize explicitly that you're actually fiddling around on the meta-level, and your meta-work doesn't necessarily have to be hard itself. I'm always on the lookout for easy ways to improve my behavior. If you're interested, consider the following observation.

If I didn't have a digital watch, I wouldn't have solved nearly as many Rubik's cubes in my life. I'm not really a competitive person, but I often find that things get more interesting when the score is being kept, even if no one else observes it but me. It's remarkable. Try this lab experiment: Take the most inane little flash game, and add some sort of score-keeping counter or timer. I bet you people will play it longer, even if there is no greater goal at all. Click the hoop, ball goes in, +1 on the counter, repeat. At the least, it transforms a series of isolated successful clicks into a bigger, more lasting success (however petty), and that makes people play longer. Moreover you might say it increases accountability for any individual click, which makes each click more important. Does this accord with your intuition? If so, you may be in luck today.

Similarly, timing a Rubik's cube solve takes an isolated incident and puts it into a bigger context with all the other times. Sometimes it's just more interesting that way. It also makes me feel more accountable---even though no one else is observing my times---and that makes the solve seem more important. More generally, people often change their behavior markedly when a measure of that behavior is introduced. Put a little meter on their showers that tells them how much water they're using (or better yet, how much it is costing them), and they tend to use less water. Keeping score changes behavior.

So, here's an exercise. What happens if you keep a detailed log of how you are spending your time for the next few days? Does it help to reveal just how much padding there is in your day (i.e. how much time you really have for productive things, if you should choose to use it)? Does actively thinking about how you are spending your time influence how you are spending your time? Sometimes I start to feel like I'm losing my form, and this is the best cure I've found to date. It's so easy to do, but it puts a lot of wind in the sails.

Trial+error<=genius? (crosswords pt 3, or, there is no 3)

noreply@blogger.com (Xan) — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 09:12:00 +0000

As long as we're on the topic of crosswords, I would just like to make one further comment. As is frequently the case, this hobby requires more work and less intelligence than people tend to imagine. They often react as if I'm some sort of "genius," but in reality, many of them could do it themselves if they put in the time.

Crossword constructors are people who tried to be constructors, not people who were born to be constructors. You should not be under the illusion that this is the exclusive domain of the superintelligent. There are too many people who got into the game simply because they had a friend who was a constructor. From looking at the pool of constructors, it seems pretty statistically intuitive to me that the big hurdle is getting yourself to seriously attempt construction in the first place. If you do, then your chances are closer to 1 in 10 than 1 in 10,000.

Let's be totally straight about one thing: making a puzzle is fundamentally a trial-and-error process. The more skilled you are, the less time it will take to attain any given level of quality, but it's still trial-and-error. Even if you could start in one corner and fill the whole puzzle without ever erasing, you're going to get more interesting results if you try some unlikely stuff along the way. On the meta-level, unlikely fill is unpredictable fill, and that's more interesting to solvers anyways. So in fact, for any given level of skill, the more trial-and-error you do, the better your puzzle will be.

So, look, it's trial-and-error for everyone. All you really need to do well is:
1: an excellent sense of what makes a good puzzle in the first place, and
2: a willingness to keep going until your puzzle is good.

And that's it. There is no #3: genius, OK?

Without #1, you're flying blind. Without #2, you don't have enough fuel to complete the journey. Understandably, at the outset most people don't know where they stand in either category, and understandably, this might make them reluctant to take off, but your odds may be quite a bit better than you think. Most importantly, it would be a mistake to sit on the runway because you're worried about #3.

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By the way, like most people who have occasionally been tagged a "genius" for some reason or another, I have to say I'm not particularly fond of the term. From where I sit, it's pretty clear that my accomplishments have mainly been the result of particularly hard work, rather than particularly high intelligence. In fact, it doesn't matter who you are. If you are producing works of "genius," people everywhere are overestimating your innate intelligence and underestimating the amount of work you've put into developing yourself. And as a consequence, "genius" seems to have taken on a meaning that mostly emphasizes innate intelligence, rather than work. And so I am uncomfortable with being labeled a "genius," because it really isn't correct the way people tend to mean it.

Compare these:
1) "You're a genius"
2) "This is a work of genius."

If you wish to steer "genius" away from the connotation that intelligence is doing the heavy lifting, it is actually necessary to explicitly attach "work." But I think most people who have been branded with #1 would agree that #2 is a considerably more comfortable fit. Edison had something to say about perspiration, and I wonder sometimes whether people realize how serious he was. Probably not. Or maybe they believe it for his case but fail to realize how broadly it actually applies.

If you're interested in constructing, what's holding you back? The worst thing would be for you to not even try, just because you don't feel like a "genius." Hey, me neither. In the title of this post, I meant "<=" as a weak inequality, but you can treat it as an arrow if it suits you.

How puzzling

noreply@blogger.com (Xan) — Mon, 25 May 2009 06:23:00 +0000

The crossword came out in the New York Times on 5/15/09! (see Making Will Shortz Almost Happy for backstory). This post is meant partly as a summary of the puzzle's reception. It was a very exciting weekend, with graduation from college and all too. The whole weekend there were crossword-solving parents of kids I did and didn't know coming up to me to introduce themselves. Definitely one of the more surreal experiences of my life.

If you want a copy of the puzzle, shoot me an email. If you just want to see the completed grid/clues, go here:
Xan's 5/15/09 puzzle

Before Internet, crosswords were a pretty solitary activity. I think it must have been the case that the highest level of feedback you could generally get on a puzzle was its acceptance by the various publications. This is sort of like having a movie picked up by a studio. Now there are critics who, spoiled by a diet consisting entirely of publishable crosswords, have set their standards so that only a small portion of these meet with their full approval. There is actually a fairly active crossword blogging community these days, so I have been taking this opportunity to really absorb their commentary. If the existence of such a community surprises you, then...get with the times! There's an active blogging community for everything these days.

Here are some links to blogs on the puzzle. You can read the blogs for their opinions, and also have a look at the comments for the opinions of the crossword consuming public, if you're interested.

The first is the official NYT crossword blog run by Jim Horne. Jim doesn't tend to say bad things about the crosswords, and in general he is more interested in the people who create them. It is not uncommon for him to have a brief interview with the constructor, as here:
Wordplay Blog

Rex Parker on the other hand is the closest crossword analog to a true movie critic. He has high standards and is not afraid to speak his mind. On the other hand, he tends to be a little more entertaining than the typical movie review. In fact, whereas all movie critics do is write essays about movies, Rex Parker goes so far as to include movies in his critiques (i.e. random embedded Youtube videos), so in some twisted sense, his critiques actually are movie critiques. So there. Also, Rex and I share the Pomona connection, which may or may not be unduly influencing his opinion of my puzzle:
Rex Parker

Amy Reynaldo solves and blogs on approximately 1,729 puzzles a day, so her commentary is less extensive than Rex's, but still quite worth a read. She is generally less willing to be harsh on the puzzles. By the way, I set a personal speed record on this puzzle (yes, I solved my own puzzle...mostly so I could set a personal record), and Amy still beat me. Granted, I was taking the opportunity to actually read all the clues to see what got changed in the editing process, but still...I mean, it's certainly not a misnomer, this "Crossword Fiend" business:
Diary of a Crossword Fiend

Here's another blog just for fun. This one is run by two hilarious guys who believe the inexpert solver should have a voice too...and a loud one :) Their motto is "Come on brains, be more smarter!" I guess it's all relative, but don't let them fool you into thinking they're remotely bad solvers...
Ryan and Brian

The crossword was received far more positively than I could possibly have anticipated. I was preparing myself for a beatdown! I think a couple things worked in my favor here. For one, the mini-theme is atypical for a Friday puzzle, and people seemed happy to have a change of pace. Also, Friday is a tough day, and this puzzle was easier than the typical Friday. The distribution of commenters may be such that most commenters prefer an easier puzzle. To be quite honest, I was seriously shooting for easy when I made the puzzle, although not so that people would like it. The way it works is, NYT puzzles get harder from Monday to Saturday, with Friday and Saturday themeless. I was targeting Friday because we only got free papers at Pomona on the weekdays, so that's when everyone on campus could go get a paper, and also it would be nice if someone I knew could actually solve the puzzle and all. Friday is an easy target; you just make a themeless puzzle that's too easy to run on Saturday.

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We're going to be moving quite far from the puzzle itself below, so if you were reading specifically for that, you may want to get out now. So far I think I've been doing a pretty good job of avoiding econ-speak in this blog, but if there's a post where I'm going to fail, it's this one.

Did I mention it was a surreal experience? I'm not sure there has ever been a reason for numerous strangers to approach me like this before. What do you say to these people? I don't think I ever properly learned how to handle accolades. I'm happy to write about these things in the spirit of impersonal honesty that's supposed to characterize this blog, but in person I'm really not too comfortable with it all. It seems odd, maybe: I love to do the things that earn compliments, but I hate the actual act of receiving compliments. It makes me very uncomfortable. What am I supposed to say? I feel like "thanks" is just acknowledgement of my supposed awesomeness, which I would prefer to completely dismiss. And when people come up to me with some bizarre desire to deliver 18 sentences of praise, "thank you" gets old after about the 3rd sentence. Does anyone know how to handle this? For some reason it's just not obvious to me.

I guess this would be my first tiny little brush with real fame (Famous hands notwithstanding). To echo the compliment sentiment above, it seems I desperately want to accomplish the sorts of things that earn fame, but I really really vehemently do NOT want to deal with fame itself. That's sort of a misleading way to say it though. What I fundamentally want is to do something excellent, and for better or for worse, often that means doing something that earns fame. I don't know how to deal with fame, and even if I figure it out, I still don't think it will be as much fun as people make it out to be, and even if it is that much fun, I don't think it will satisfy my particular goals. Playing video games would be a lot of fun too, but there are simply more important things on my todo list.

Here is where I would discuss all the costs and benefits---oops, for non-econ people that would be "pros and cons"---of fame vis-a-vis my goals. However, observe as I masterfully gloss over all other important details and skip straight to the particular fame-related issue I actually want to talk about today, skillfully employing a phrase that would make a good crossword entry, as well as both vertical and horizontal ellipses, though not necessarily in that order, and yadda yadda yadda...
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One problem with popularity (and as a result, fame) is that it increases the tension between introversion and extroversion, and this tension makes it harder for me to achieve my goals. By introversion I mean preferring to keep to oneself (in particular this doesn't imply shyness), and in this sense my personality is thoroughly dominated by introversion. After a year of classes, grad school applications, and senior theses, I have some free time. This week, more than anything else, I want to sit in my room and deal with the enormous backlog of crossword puzzles I haven't had time to put together lately. Meanwhile, more than anything else, many people want to go hang out with their friends. That's fine, but when I am one of these friends, there is tension. It's not that I don't want to spend time with them, but sometimes other things get weighted more heavily.

In fact, I know a small handful of people who can best be described as "corner solution extroverts." For these people, Heaven consists of a room with a conveyor belt that brings in a new person every 5 minutes, for eternity. Hey, that's fine. But in my experience, these people are often unable to grasp the notion that others might prefer a relatively low degree of social interaction. It's a totally one-way street, too; there aren't any introverts who go around insisting that social butterflies absolutely MUST spend more quality time with their own thoughts. We are not confused by the existence of extroverts. Yet there is this class of extroverts who think that socialness is the be-all end-all of human existence, and that we would surely think so too, if only we were properly exposed to it. These people attempt to drag us to parties, and they say things like, "Oh, you absolutely MUST meet person XYZ!" Well, maybe I know enough people for now. In fact, it's entirely possible that I am currently overinvesting in human relationships. (False at the moment, since with the end of college and all, my social life is getting a big reboot. But normally, when I hit a nice steady state, I don't feel compelled to go out of my way to meet new people). Of course, to these extroverts, there is no such thing as "enough people," what with the conveyor belt and all. I guess what I'm saying is, if "enough people" is alien to you, fair enough; I don't understand all the extra colors hummingbirds can see, either. But once I read the Wikipedia article, I realized pretty quick that I probably wasn't the best critic of hummingbird artwork. So what's going on, guys? Have you made it this far in life without ever once being pointed toward this line of reasoning? Or are you just stubbornly denying the existence of certain colors because you can't see them?

(Note by the way that in the paragraph above I'm specifically talking about making new friends, not "connections." The same basic comment applies, but you would probably want to change the stock (of friends) to a rate (of making connections).)

Time to add one final layer of complexity. Because I consciously don't want to be spending large amounts of time at parties, I have actually taken steps to avoid making parties an attractive way to spend my time. Drinking, for example, is something I have avoided. Here's the thing. You can't experience a craving for something that inhabits a dimension you've never moved along. If you've never done drugs, then you simply don't want cocaine right now. Think about this: If you live on a world where the food is bland, and it's all that you've ever eaten, and I give you a piece of chocolate cake, what should you do? Eat it, right? See what you're missing. Experience. But be aware of the fact that afterwards, you will be left with your bland food for the rest of your life, with nothing left of the cake besides the wish that you had more. There's nothing fun about longing for something you can't have, and it is entirely possible that eating the cake will make you worse off on the whole. Now replace bland food with normal food, and cake with heroin, and wish with eternal craving, and tell me why I should "try it before I knock it." Expanding your experience is somewhat irreversible, and it's not an unambiguously good thing.

I am not suggesting that we shouldn't eat cake. I am suggesting that we probably shouldn't sample heroin lightly. And I am suggesting that drinking may not be the right thing to get into at this particular stage of my particular life. These things lie on a spectrum, and we all need to decide for ourselves where to draw the line. Acquaintance with alcohol makes it harder to resist spending time on drinking-related activities, and even when successful, resistance is not a fun thing to be putting up all the time. The alternative is to never get involved. People don't understand why I avoid alcohol, but it's sitting right there on the same spectrum as the other drugs they're avoiding, albeit considerably to the left. Meanwhile, as usual, I am just at a very different place on the human spectrum, because I have a particular definition of what constitutes productive time, and I place a particularly high value on it.

So as usual, my differences induce an atypical sort of behavior. My reasons are not moral or religious or anything like that. At this time in my life, I have some very big goals, and by the way, college is the environment in which drinking poses the most serious threat to those goals. People say, "If ever there was a time to drink, it's college!" and due to the prevalence of that sentiment, exactly the opposite becomes true for me. The Wear Sunscreen person, Mary Schmich, spoke at our commencement, and I have to say, I think I have a pretty good appreciation for the "power and beauty of youth." Things are really accelerating around here, and I'm trying to waste as little of it as possible. It's just an incredibly exciting time. Am I missing out on some of the things most people do when they're young? Sure. But these have been replaced with other things that most people never do, young or old, and I'm having a lot of fun with them. It would be a mistake to think that I'm a repressed workaholic who never let himself live.

Is this the utility maximizing decision? I think so, but in fact, I don't really know. There is considerable uncertainty here. For one thing though, I am risk averse and I know with certainty the payoffs I am currently receiving, and I'm quite hesitant to mess with the formula. And for another thing, many psychologists seem to believe---and I think I agree with respect to the level effect---that opening up and inhabiting new dimensions of experience does't necessarily make one happier anyways.

By the middle of high school, my time became valuable enough that video games were not worth playing. By the end of high school, I had a very clear intuition about what was going on, although I could not have formulated any concrete explanation of it. By the middle of college, the explicit reasoning had solidified, and now, by the end of college, I have really settled into this directed way of living.

The direction is up. I know exactly why I do the things I do. Are you going somewhere, and why or why not? There's nothing that says you have to be in motion. However, if you want to be, and you're not, then maybe it's time to think seriously about why you do the things you do.

I leave off with the words of a man who used to work 12-18 hour days in the studio:

Time is the thing. Time is everything. How to spend time. We all want something to do with our minds. The choices are a major human preoccupation. The people who find the easiest solutions, like beer and football, might be happier if they had just a little dimension to their lives. But most people, once they achieve a certain level of gratification for time disposal, don't go beyond it. They already know how good they're going to feel when a football game comes on, and they have their beer. They don't want to know beyond that. They build a life around it.

-Frank Zappa